“I’m not going to beg you to stay.”
(Now that was a bad time to call my bluff. A simple: ‘Gil, don’t leave me like this’ would have sufficed and melted me and kept me by her side, changed everything, maybe even the Course Of History.) So I leave. I’ll come back for my other things, I say, when Emma is at work. So she lets me go.
I drag my bag to the PATH station and go to Jersey. Janet asks how it went, and I say here I am at your house so how do you think it went? Then we worried that Emma might do something rash.
“Call her, Gil,” said Janet, “give her another chance.”
No, it wouldn’t do any good—wait, YOU call her.
So Janet calls Emma: “Em, hey, it’s Janet…” Janet flashes a so-far-so-good look to me. “Sound sorta down. Hm? Oh really? What’d y’all fight about?” Pause. “Well you know how I feel about that too. He’s probably got a point, kid. No he’s not here. Emma, I promise you”—Janet crosses her fingers, wincing—“he’s not here. Yeah, I’ll take a message.” Janet looks at me as Emma gives her a message.
She told me to drop dead?
“No,” Janet said after putting down the receiver. “She said for you to move back. She gives in.”
And so I go back with my suitcase onto the subway and three stops later I’m back home. Why did I have to pack the world’s heaviest suitcase for dramatic-exit purposes? I get there and Emma’s left me a note on the table: Sorry. We’ll talk tomorrow. Love, Emma. And I call for her but there’s no sound. I check her room and she’s in there asleep, out cold—a momentary panic, did she … no, it’s all right, she stirs and rolls over, smiling at me. I ask if she’s all right and she nods.
“Yuh, I’b tok wib du tomorrow…” She’s doped up and can’t speak without slurring.
I close the door and turn off her desk light and then go over to the bed and lift her off her blanket and put her blanket on top of her and tuck her in and then I go to the door but turn back to her bedside, kneel down, look at Emma at her most defenseless, and as she can do little about it, I kiss her on the forehead.
Good night, Emma.
Things looked up from there. Briefly.
Janet made her go to this clinic for a consultation. She dropped the quack doctor-dispenser. She kept up the group therapy and joined an A.A.-style discussion group.
“I sort out my sex life on Tuesdays with the group, and then I sort out my drug life on Fridays with this other group. How long,” she’d joke, “until I get a problem for each day of the week? Ha ha ha, just kidding—these are the jokes, folks. C’mon lighten up. Get that look off your face. Gil, my man, you should see some of the people at this clinic for the downer addicts.” Emma came in and sat on my bed to give me her nightly progress report. “They vary all the participants. Each group gets a few low-level users who caught their habit in time”—Emma waves her hand to signify herself—“and there are some speed freaks who got hooked on downers trying to come down from going up so high, and we’ve got some East Side middle-aged executives’ wives types. Some can’t think or move right, some talk like there’s mush in their mouth, one woman has a paralyzed arm—yuccch. Lot of shitty lives out there, Gil.”
Yeah well be glad you’ve kept the shit at a minimum.
“My new goal in life,” she said.
And she patted my leg, got up, went to bed, the New Emma, and I sat there, feeling, of all things, a little sad … no, I REALLY can’t confess this. Well, all right: I think I didn’t mind it so terribly much as I might have that Emma was in trouble. Now that is just terrible, I know, but I thought I might be needed, I thought I might be called upon to help in some way. Yes, it’s crummy even once in a while to think something like that about a friend, but it’s also crummy never to feel necessary to someone, just along for the laughs, a place filler.
So there was plenty to think about that summer and lots of time to think, as it turned out. I liked night shift for that purpose. When you work night shift you can at any time fall dead asleep—the body has decades of training in sleeping at night and suddenly you reverse all that, but the body remembers, and even with eight hours of good sleep during the day, if you put your head down, shut your eyes for even a minute, you’re GONE. The only recourse is coffee and lots of it. Around 2:30 A.M. it thinned out in midtown Manhattan and Valene and I would get to rest, get to sit down and rub our feet for a while. We would pray to the Restaurant God not to send us any more customers—after you sit down for twenty minutes you’re shot waiting tables, you might as well go home and go to bed, further movement is out of the question. Valene and I would look antagonistically at each other as a customer would come in:
“He’s yours babe. He’s got your name all over him.”
No Valene, he’s yours. Wait. If he sits at a table with a ketchup bottle, he’s yours.
“It’s a deal…” Valene started smiling as he headed toward a ketchupless table, and he almost sat down, but no … “Hell, don’t go there, old man, no—don’t do it … oh, damn you, damn you…” Valene groaningly, with superhuman effort, got to her feet to take the order.
And I could get back to my new hobby, staring out into the night, that vague reflection of myself in the window; out there was the New York Night, inside I was warm in the fluorescent-white glow and touch of red from the neon MEALS TO GO • 24 HOURS sign. If I had a quarter I’d put a song on the jukebox, sometimes just to get Valene dancing, sometimes just to make her mad (“Don’t put on that new-wavey-punk shit thing,” Valene warned). Outside the traffic would whiz by, or in a nicer memory, it was raining outside and you’d hear the slish of cabs and passing cars, young people outside running about, snatches of conversation, a predictable burst of noise as the last movies would let out, the midnight strip shows, the bars closing. Some drunks and some bums came in, some streetpeople, and Mr. Jackson would show them to the door or give them a cup of coffee if they were a nice bum, it all depended.
Around 4 A.M. Phelia came in, an older black woman—she had this wild pair of cat-eye glasses—a friend of Mrs. Jackson’s, a neighbor up in Harlem. Phelia cleaned floors in Rockefeller Center and this was her “lunch hour,” and she’d always decline everything on the menu, everything on special for just a little toast and coffee. Mrs. Jackson and Moze, who took his break now while Mr. Jackson loaded the dishwasher, sat and gossiped with her every night over coffee, not at a New York pace, but a slow middle-of-the-night, hard-day-at-work pace. Lots of pauses between the comments, everything good repeated and repeated, nodded to, considered.
“A man,” said Mrs. Jackson, winding up, “a man will go elsewhere in his marriage.” Pause. “He will go elsewhere, and I know what I’m talking about, he will go elsewhere,” she takes a breath and raises a knowing eyebrow, “for a little sweetness.”
“Yez, he will,” says Moze, nodding.
“That’s right,” said Phelia.
“If he ain’t getting the proper sweetness at home,” Mrs. Jackson went on, “he’s gonna get it elsewhere. He will go elsewhere for a little sweetness.”
“Yes he will,” said Phelia, setting down her coffee cup.
No one says much and more cabs and cars pass by rattling the windows, an occasional honk.
“I’m not talkin’ ’bout loving,” said Mrs. Jackson.
“I know you’re not,” said Phelia, pursing her lips. “You’re talkin’ ’bout sweetness.”
“I’m talkin’ ’bout sweetness,” said Mrs. Jackson.
“Like with Mavis and her man,” said Phelia.
“That’s ’zactly what I’m talkin’ ’bout. Mavis and her man. That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout right there. Now she come to me all teary-eyed, all messed up and cryin’, she come in here at three in the mornin’, sat in that booth right there—oooh Evelyn, oooh Evelyn, woe is me she says, he’s goin’ back to her again, I jus’ know it. Evelyn, she tells me, I gave him my best lovin’. That man want for nothin’. She’s tellin’ me all this. Now Mavis could give Bernard the lovin’.”
“A man will go elsewhere for a little sweetness.”
“Yeah,” said Moze.
“He will,” Mrs. Jackson continued. “Now you know, I see a lot in here—”
Phelia: “Yes you surely do.”
“—and I seen some things. And I know who Bernard was with, ’cause I saw ’em both in here. Right in that booth.”
Phelia shook her head. “No? Bernard brought that girl right in here, in front of you?”
“Uh-huh. And you know why? ’Cause I don’t think nothin’ was goin’ on. They weren’t doin’ stuff. No ma’am. I was watchin’ ’em—there was no hand-holdin’ or touchin’ or nothin’; they’s just talkin’. Just talkin’.”
“Talkin’,” repeated Phelia, after a sip of coffee.
“He weren’t steppin’ out on Mavis for the lovin’. I’m sure of that. He wanted someone to listen to him. You know Mavis. You can’t tell her nothin’ and she gets all this nonsense goin’, never lets poor Bernard be.”
Moze nodded: “Man ain’t after booty night ’n day. He wants some unnerstandin’.”
“Mavis thought,” whispered Mrs. Jackson, risking an indelicacy, “that he was goin’ out on her for a little piece of leg, but she didn’t get it right.”
“Gotta have unnerstandin’,” said Moze.
“It had nothin’ to do with sex,” said Mrs. Jackson, raising that eyebrow again.
“I wouldn’ta let Bernard get out my front door, ehhmm ehhmm,” said Phelia, with a slight cackle.
“A man will go elsewhere for a little sweetness,” said Mrs. Jackson, pouring some more coffee all around.
And on and on the story would go repeating itself, with new touches here and there, Mavis who couldn’t keep her man. And I’d listen to this advice from people who had seen a lot of life uptown. And of course, I think Mrs. Jackson put her finger on something: a man will do a lot for a little sweetness. I never thought of myself as “a man” you could generalize about with all the other men when people talk about “men this” and “men that,” but I wouldn’t have minded a little sweetness a little more often in my life.
Mr. Jackson would come out of the kitchen after loading the washer and listen to his wife go on about “sweetness,” and then he’d sneak up behind her and hug her and get her laughing, asking for a little sugar, or he was going to have to go elsewhere for his sweetness, and Phelia would laugh, and then he’d come after her (she was about sixty, churchgoing, unmarried all her life) and he made her blush looking for a little sweetness, while she waved him off, “Now you go on—I swear Tom Jackson, Lord help you,” etc.
And so it went, the talk and the coffee and the handful of customers until the dawn. It was 6 a.m. and soon the New Yorkers who hadn’t been awake all night, up for less than a half hour, stumbled in, untalkative and curt and dreading work, and we’d give them their coffee and keep ourselves going until the morning crew came in to relieve us. And soon I was saying goodbye and dragging home in needlessly bright sunlight, noticing the relatively fresh air of Manhattan before the cars invaded, and I took the empty subway home—yes, that part was nice, everyone was coming in to work and you were going home with maybe a few other night-shifters for company, you could recognize each other.
And Emma would be up and jittery (“I can’t sleep worth dog-do these days,” she’d snap) or she’d be impossible to rouse, and I’d have to shake her awake, point out to her her alarm had been sounding for half an hour already. Everything depended on whether she’d been able to resist taking pills or not. She was trying to quit, so I wasn’t harsh … but in the morning light, sitting at our dinner table, listening to the city rouse and begin to vibrate, I often felt myself not caring about anything except the sleep I had been fighting off all night long (perversely, you never wanted to sleep when you did get home). I don’t know if it was the mind-wearying job or the way I truly felt but I could have let it ALL go, let all the important things fall away; pure indifference. My world had become very small—the newspaper crossword, counting the loose change of the day’s tips. The Theater seemed wonderfully far away, and it could stay there for all I cared. There was a small longing for something better, something passionate and soul-baring, but this was longing for the moon, and like my other dreams it fell quietly to rest, abandoned with my other cares as I would finally give way to sleep at 8:30 a.m.
Emma was on the phone one night and she needed to find an address in her address book which was in her desk and she asked if I could get it for her. So I ran to her room, tried all the drawers (one was locked, which I thought was odd), got her address book and started wondering about the locked drawer. Pills, I thought. That’s where she hides the pills. Very calmly, after she got off the phone, I told her I knew she was sneaking pills—any fool could tell—and I figured they were in that locked drawer.
“They are not. You don’t trust me at all, I see.”
All right—open the drawer and I’ll be proven wrong and I’ll apologize and I’ll buy a whole pizza.
“I don’t have to open that drawer. I’m not on trial.”
Of course, you have your right to privacy and I’m out of line, and I’ll not mention it again, I’m sorry. But if those are pills, I added, then you’ll be in for it and I’m moving out.
“They’re not pills, Gil, I promise.” She looked sincere. “There is something you probably wouldn’t like in the drawer, but they’re not barbiturates. Really.”
Silence for the next ten minutes. Am I going to ask her what’s in the drawer? Nah, I know this girl: She’ll tell me if I don’t show any interest.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said from the kitchen. “You think if you show no interest I’ll tell you what’s in that drawer. I would tell you but it’s something you’re going to disapprove of. So I’m not going to tell you.”
Pills, I said. I bet it’s a mountain of pills.
“Let’s not talk about it.”
What on earth would I disapprove of, I who encouraged her to go solo in the phone-sex business? Ah, it’s probably something ridiculous, I said, so let’s forget it—
“It’s not nothing. You’d hate it. We’d have a fight.”
All right, c’mon, tell me. Tell me right now.
“No.”
If I promise not to disapprove?
“You’ll disapprove anyway.”
She seemed sincere about not wanting to show me … and yet she sort of wanted to show me, I could tell.
“All right, I’ll show you so you’ll shut up about me taking drugs. It’s not narcotics, I swear—narcotics of any kind.”
So we went into her room and she got out her key and undid the drawer and then stood back for me to open it up. At this point I figured it wasn’t barbiturates and I was going to have to buy her a pizza. Maybe … my goodness, birth-control pills, maybe? She was sexually active again? My heart froze! Why didn’t she tell me if she was—god—SEEING someone, someone male, someone who wasn’t me. Oh the day had come, hadn’t it? All right, be a MAN, Gil, open the drawer … which I did. Inside it was a gun.
“It’s a gun,” she said.
I know it’s a gun. You’re right: I disapprove—but I’m being calm about it, okay? Why do you have a gun? How did you get a gun? Good Lord, Uncle Harry. I thought you were joking about Jasmine’s Uncle Harry, NRA member, gun-nut Veteran’s Association conservative red-blooded American to the right of Hitler. Emma NO, please no. Did you know it’s a felony for a private citizen to own a gun in New York City? Did you know that could kill someone?
“Gil,” she said, doing a Ronald Reagan impression, “I think we both know that, well, guns don’t kill people … people kill people.”
You think this is funny, Emma. You bought this for amusement, to camp around with. Is it loaded?
“Ammo’s in the box there. Hey! Wanna load it up, pick off people from the window? Clean the streets? Dirty Emma?”
I slammed the desk drawer shut: no.
“After Lennon got shot, I got to thinking: My life is in daily danger in this city. Then my stuff got ripped off while we were having a party a room away. It’s a jungle. And every looney out there wants to rape me, beat me, steal my few precious things, and I want a gun. What’s so controversial? Lots of single women in this city have guns for their protection. Do you blame them?”
Not really, but why do you think you ought to have one?
“Because I want one. It’s a symbol. I feel better knowing I can blow my potential rapist away, that I can clean the streets. I’m not gonna clean the streets, Gil, get that worried look off your face.”
Wouldn’t a can of mace be better?
“It’s a statement I’m making, Gil. I don’t want to burn a rapist’s eyes and run away, leaving him to go free. I want to kill him. Blow him away. Obliterate him. Waste him.”
Would you stop talking about blowing people away? You’ll probably blow me away one night when I come back late.
“I’ve had this for some time and haven’t blown you away yet.”
And Emma, it’s a tremendous gun—it looks like it could go off by itself.
“I wanted a phallic gun, okay? A penis.”
Since when do you want a penis?
“Don’t make fun of the gunlady, Gil. I’m armed now, so watch it.” She pulled open the drawer and took out the gun, stroking it lovingly, smiling, enjoying the outrage.
What kind is it?
“It’s a 9-millimeter—Uncle Harry means business. That’s where Hinckley fouled up. He shot Reagan with a .22 caliber, which wouldn’t kill your grandmother—a pea-shooter. If you’re going to kill a president you’re gonna need a man-sized caliber—if Hinckley had been packing, say, a snub-nosed .38, with hollow-point ‘cop-killer’ bullets, we’d be calling George Bush Mr. President today, Nancy Reagan would be working Hollywood Squares. You know, the hollow-point bullet saved the .38-caliber from extinction—the .33’s only partially effective, and of course the .45s tear your arm off on the recoil—”
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 41